Official applications and appointments to posts would take place over the next few weeks, but tonight was the important night — the September graduate cattle market.
The evenings always reminded Toreth pleasantly of picking teams for sports at school. Then he'd been one of the popular ones, always chosen early. Rarely, though, as he was now at I&I, had he been one of the choosers. He'd been too much of a troublemaker at school to be placed in charge of anything.
He enjoyed the air of competition, of winning his own choices — which he usually did, if there was anyone he wanted — and watching others lose theirs. This year Toreth had only one vacant spot on his team, which was how he liked it. A settled, reliable team made his life infinitely easier than running a changing stable.
Doyle and Lambrick's departures earlier in the year had been aberrations. Lately, generous raises and accommodation provisions had helped his team's permanence. Since the SimTech case, he'd had a brittler relationship with Tillotson, but the section head had definitely been warier about refusing Toreth's budget requests. Toreth had never felt like pushing the advantage, but Warrick's intervention and blackmail threat had obviously left a deep impression.
Toreth spotted the other General Criminal seniors in a loose group at the far end of the room near the bar, and began to work his way over to them. Most would be accompanied by their personal admins, although few of those were in the group. They'd be in the crowd, picking out the graduates their bosses wanted to talk to. From that he concluded that he wasn't as late as he'd feared.
Senior para-investigators weren't the only ones looking for fresh blood. As Toreth crossed the room, he noticed Elizabeth Carey. Phil Verstraeten was still a professional and personal fixture in her team, and it wasn't long before Toreth spotted the anaemic side-kick, talking to a man Toreth guessed to be a newly qualified investigator.
For the fresh investigators and interrogators, the evening wasn't so vital. It was expected that they would start their careers in the pool of staff available to be assigned to cases as required. Being chosen by a senior specialist or para for their personal team was prestigious, but not essential.
Not so for the new junior para-investigators. The best could afford to be choosy. For those lower down the pecking order, the market meant an agonising evening of watching their numbers whittled slowly down to the rejects. Marked by their failure to find a senior who wanted them, they became pool juniors, a position from which promotion to senior was unlikely. Their growing air of desperation always left Toreth hungry for a fuck by the end of the evening.
To Toreth's delight, when he reached the bar, Chevril was just ordering himself a drink. No doubt he'd waited until everyone else had got one before joining the group. Chevril owed so many drinks to so many people that his reluctance to stand a round had gone beyond a section joke and attained the status of legend.
"I'll have a whiskey and soda, thanks, Chev," Toreth said.
"Got your ticket?" Chevril asked.
"Sara's got it."
Chevril took his glass from the admin tending the bar, pulling it protectively towards him. "This is my included-in-the-entry drink."
"Doesn't stop you buying one for me, does it?"
Chevril struggled with the logic for as long as possible, then finally gave up and turned to the admin.
"Whatever it was he wanted," Chevril said sourly.
"And a white wine for Sara," Toreth added to Chevril's evident disgust.
Two drinks out of Chevril in one go was something of a record. Cheered by the minor victory, Toreth joined the other seniors. In the short time he'd been at the bar, most had dispersed, which confirmed his guess that he wasn't too much of a latecomer. Looking round, he picked them out in the crowd, now surrounded by varyingly sized groups of newly-qualified personnel.
Chevril would have a list of places to fill. Every year at least one of his team would've managed to piss him off irreversibly, and another two or three might decide to move on. Toreth caught a glimpse of Kel, shepherding a group towards them. Chevril muttered excuses and went to meet his admin, no doubt wanting to keep his choices away from the competition.
Toreth didn't care. None of the men or women with Kel were on his own list.
That left him alone with Mike Belkin, one of the older General Criminal seniors, who usually had an even longer list than Chev. Notoriously difficult to work for, his high-profile cases and success rates still attracted willing newcomers. He didn't bring his admin to the cattle markets, nor any of the rest of his team — to avoid having their haggard faces scare away potential recruits, according to Sara.
This year Belkin looked relaxed, surveying the room with a casual, detached interest.
"Not shopping?" Toreth asked him.
Belkin drained half his glass, then shook his head. "Maylor's retiring," he said, then sat back, watching Toreth with a faint smile. Waiting for a reaction.
Which Toreth couldn't help giving him. "Richie Maylor? Political Crimes?"
"Mm-hm. He's still having problems with his back after the bombing and they've decided to ditch him on a medical early retirement instead of putting up with all that fucking around on and off sick-leave. He's not happy about it."
Sara had picked up a vague rumour to that end, but nothing concrete. "And you've got first pick of his team? You lucky bastard."
Belkin grinned smugly. "Favours owed; you know how it is. I only marked half of them, so there's some left if you don't get lucky tonight."
"I think I've got some good candidates lined up." And Toreth would rather choke than swallow Belkin's rejected leftovers, good as they probably were if they'd belonged to Maylor. "And I've got better things to do with my time than break juniors out of other people's bad habits."
"So that's what you're looking for?" Belkin asked.
"Yeah, one junior."
"That all?"
"I'm happy with what I've got."
"Right. And of course they would all be happy with you."
Generally Toreth didn't mind his reputation as an easy senior to work for, but Belkin managed to make it sound like an unpleasant and probably communicable disease. "I take the right ones to start with, and I got decent raises for them in the last couple of assessments so they've got no reason to go anywhere." Except Doyle and Lambrick, the ungrateful bastards.
"Hey, if I went as far as you do with Tillotson to get good cases assigned, I'd expect a nice budget, too. And flowers."
Jesus, some rumours never died. "Chev started that story, did you know that? He was fucked off 'cause he tried to chat me up and I turned him down."
Belkin's eyes crinkled in a near-smile. "You do talk shite."
"Yeah?" Toreth held up his glass. "Why would he buy me drinks if he didn't want my arse?"
Belkin snorted with laughter, but before he could reply Toreth spotted Sara in the crowd, with a group of four juniors. Toreth picked up his glass and Sara's. "Got to go. Duty calls."
He watched Sara's hand as she introduced the group to him. He knew the names already, of course, but the hand signals gave her most up-to-date count of how many other seniors were serious about the new juniors.
"Jasric Ouellette." Three fingers — three seniors interested in him, as far as Sara had been able to determine.
"Andrew Rust." Four.
"Niall Custer." Another three.
"And Joielin Nagra." Five, and then a twitch of her fingers that meant 'more than'. Must be good, although he'd have to ask who was interested because her pure Afro-Caribbean good looks might have something to do with it: beautiful bone structure, smooth skin like polished chocolate, full lips glossed dark red, and close-cut hair. Lovely visuals for fucking in any position, and there were certainly five-plus seniors in I&I who'd pick her out just for that.
"She was with Hepburn when I found her," Sara said in an undertone as they made their way to the bar. "But I prised her away while he was busy with someone else."
Drinks arranged, Toreth cleared a table of a group of new investigators, who seemed to be testing the limits of human ethanol tolerance. He arranged his haul to his satisfaction, two talking to him, two being tested out by Sara.
While he listened to Ouellette describe his experience in his Information and Communications Crimes investigation placement, Toreth kept half an ear on Sara's conversation with Rust and Custer.
"Are you a junior?" Rust asked her.
Sara laughed. "God, no. I'm the Para's admin."
"Oh." A pause, as Rust clearly tried to think of something suitable to say to such an inferior creature.
"If you look, there are plenty of admins here," Custer commented, quiet and neutral.
"Well, yes. Someone has to carry the screens and get the drinks." Rust laughed, stopping when the other two failed to join in.
Toreth smiled to himself, then noticed that Ouellette's account had come to an end. Nothing in it had caught his attention, so he turned to Nagra.
"You took the intermediate paediatric interrogation option." A specialism his team currently lacked. "What did you think of it?"
"I enjoyed the challenge of working with a restricted set of tools. I took the impaired reasoning and medically vulnerable courses for the same reason."
"Light touch?" Ouellette said, with a subtly insulting inflection that reminded Toreth of Belkin.
"I took all the basic courses." Her tone had a touch of both anger and defensiveness; Toreth suspected she'd heard this accusation before. "There are only so many specialist options."
"I don't remember seeing you in any of the high-waiver ones, though," Ouellette said.
Her eyes narrowed. "Anyone can get a confession with a neural induction probe."
"But can anyone get the right confession?" Toreth asked. The confrontation broke off as they both belatedly remembered his presence, and the rivalry shifted into more subtle areas.
Competitive anecdotes, accounts of extra work experience assignments taken, jockeying to mention who had bested whom in various exams — Toreth listened more than he talked, letting the two of them fight it out. In the end, he'd take the best of these two, and the best of Sara's pair, and set them against each other again.
"What do you think of Rust?" he asked Sara after the first half-hour, when they returned to the bar.
"Reminds me of Tillotson," she said without hesitating. "And he's an arrogant wanker. If you're seriously thinking about him, I'm resigning right now."
"He had good scores, but you know how much that means. Okay. Tell him and Ouellette to fuck off while I get drinks for the other two." She'd enjoy the chance to do that.
Who to take? Custer had the better training grades, but Toreth had had his fingers burned before by Belqola and his ninety-fifth-percentile scores. One evening's conversation wasn't much of a basis for selection either, but both juniors seemed willing to sit out the interview, rather than chase off after another offer — a good sign from both of them, given that they should have no problem finding some kind of place. Especially promising since General Criminal was far from the highest status section in the Division.
After an hour or so he found himself leaning towards choosing Custer. Rather quiet, but disciplined, which made for a good junior if rarely a spectacular one. Nagra had a sharper edge which might mean she'd be effective and independent, or might mean she'd spend her time undercutting him in an attempt to curry favour higher up the I&I food chain.
His mind almost made up, he found himself looking at Nagra again from a distinctly non-professional perspective. With no need to apply his rule of not fucking inside the team, he decided to see how far Nagra would go to impress a potential boss. She was tempting enough, even without the added spice of coercion.
Dispatching Custer for more drinks, he shifted a little closer to her. Sara looked studiously away.
"What do you think of the evening?" he asked. "As a way of recruiting juniors?"
"I suppose it's better than picking names out of a hat. But it's rather loud, Para."
Nice of her to leave him an opening. "You're right — it's no way to really get to know people. We could go somewhere quieter, if you'd prefer. A bar. Or somewhere closer. Do the trainee juniors still rate single rooms in their last year?"
Nagra smiled easily. "Is that a pick-up?"
The directness caught him by surprise. "Would you like it to be?"
"Well . . . " The smile again, and still no sign of nervousness. "No. I'm not usually a lesbian, Para, but for you I'll make an exception."
Which got her the job there and then.
Toreth was mildly flattered that when he told her, she didn't hesitate to accept.
"I'd be honoured," she said. "You've been top of my list since I did the General Criminal placement. And even before — how could I do better than working for the man who cracked the Selman kidnapping?"
He wondered whether she'd ever get to hear the real story.
"I'll make it official tomorrow." He waved into the crowd. "Go enjoy yourself — you don't have to hang around with me."
He'd expected at least a polite half-hour out of her, but instead she stood. "Thanks, Para. I look forward to starting work."
He watched her go, then turned to Sara, who'd been snickering quietly into her drink.
"Did you warn her?"
"About what?" Sara asked, so innocently that she might as well have said yes.
Nevertheless, he clarified the question. "Did you warn Nagra what it meant if I tried to pick her up?"
"Maybe." Sara examined his face searchingly, then grinned, obviously reassured by his smile. "Yeah, I did."
"Good. I couldn't tell — she's very smooth. I think she'll work out well."
"Me too. And she's friendly. For a para, I mean."
Toreth nodded, not taking offense.
Custer reappeared, holding the drinks. Nagra's absence clearly registered at once, and his expression was a perfect blend of optimism and expectation of disappointment.